Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Ravi Shankar, CMO and SVP at Denodo
AI-Ready Corporate Data – Using RAG and Data Fabric
We have all used ChatGPT to get answers to general questions like “provide an itinerary for a 3-day holiday trip to Madrid.” But how cool would it be if we could ask such questions, in textual format, about our business and receive similar answers? Well ChatGPT can’t provide the answers because it has been trained only on publicly available information on the internet and not on your corporate data, which is hidden behind a firewall.
However, starting in 2025, GenAI will be able to answer questions related to the inner workings of a business. For e.g., loan officers in a bank can ask “how many loans have been disbursed in the previous month,” and receive an instant answer. This would be possible because of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), which will augment the LLMs knowledge with corporate-specific information. But that’s easier said than done, because enterprise data can be distributed across different systems in various locations and different formats. To solve this problem, the RAG needs a trusted data management system, like a data fabric.
Since a data fabric already aggregates corporate data, irrespective of where it is stored or its format, the fabric can provide the unified corporate data to the LLM. By adding contextual awareness of the corporate data, RAG enables public LLMs to answer enterprise-specific questions (like the one above). AI-ready corporate data, enabled by RAG and data fabric, will be a key trend in 2025.
AI-Ready Humans
As AI becomes pervasive within organizations, C-level executives are demanding their managers to train their labor workforce to improve their productivity and produce more. This mandate requires massive training of employees especially in customer facing functions like sales, marketing, and customer service. AI literacy will be a key trend in 2025.
AI literacy aims to train employees to effectively use GenAI tools and thus automate their routine tasks. Such automation can save employees significant time and thus boost their output. Gartner found out in a survey of CDAOs that 80% of them believe that data literacy will get more attention in 2024.
But such training is not the same for all employees. Business users will be trained on using AI chatbots, while developers will be trained on code generation tools, that build the AI chatbots.
AI-Challenge
As AI becomes better at answering questions, executives will rely on AI to provide recommendations to make decisions. Companies will be forced to ask themselves how much they should trust the AI more than their managers?
In 2025, we should see humans being pitted against AI to prove who might be entrusted more to provide better data and insights to the executives. One advantage the AI tools will have over humans is their ability to quickly digest vast amounts of information and provide accurate answers instantaneously. For e.g. if you asked a manager to name all customers acquired in the current quarter, he/she might find it difficult to answer at the top of their mind. However, an LLM can respond with significant accuracy, that will boost the confidence of managers to trust them over their employees.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ravi Shankar is responsible for Denodo’s global marketing efforts, including product marketing, demand generation, communications, and partner marketing. Ravi brings to his role more than 25 years of proven marketing leadership from enterprise software leaders such as Oracle and Informatica. Ravi holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
